Month: November 2011

In an effort to bring the community into our development process more, I (ocharles) have built a new little application to help the MusicBrainz community decide exactly what we should focus on. I present to you, the Scheduling Game!

The Scheduling Game

The idea behind this little application is to let the community quickly scan through open issues and decide when they believe they should be fixed. Each editor is presented with 3 options:

Within 3 months. This ticket must absolutely be fixed within 3 months from now.

Within 12 months. This ticket should be fixed within a year from now. This means the ticket should be fixed within the year, but is not critical for the next 3 months

Unscheduled. This issue is not pressing and can be fixed much later.

Later, when issues have been voted on by enough people, the developers will try and decide how to schedule work to best fit the needs of the community.

A few disclaimers… Firstly, this is just an experiment! We don’t know how well it will work, though initial testing has shown it to already be quite useful. Secondly, it’s not really much of a game, but I wanted to give it a cute name (I know how picky everyone can be!). Currently only a subset of open tickets are available for voting on – specifically tickets in the “NGS + 1” and “Post NGS” milestones on JIRA, as these milestones are in need of a sorting.

A few days behind on this one, but we’ve got this release out. This release has one controversial change, which I want to discuss in this blog post.

Displaying Relationships on Release Pages

A lot of people want this, and we’ve shipped something that adds this functionality. However, a lot of people think this is too verbose, and to a point I agree – there’s a lot of information there that can be displayed better. However, work on this issue has been on and off for almost the past 2 years. We’ve got a solution here that while far from ideal will get this ball rolling.

This is an unpopular move on my half, but I’m asking users to please try and bear with us until the next release (scheduled in for 5th December), which is just over a week away. Hopefully having this fairly messy display so open will raise enough discussion on how exactly to move forward. If you really must see it gone, you can use AdBlock or user styles in your browser to hide the dl.ars element.

It’s been a while, but we’ve finally got a new server release out! This one didn’t go perfectly smoothly, and we had (more, i’m afraid) troubles with the release editor. We’ve got a fix for this out, so editing should be at least as stable as it was before. As always, please do continue to report any bugs you find. Here’s what’s changed:

An application that uses our python-musicbrainz/0.7.3 client library has been putting undue load on our servers all at once. This application looks up something at MusicBrainz at 03:00UTC causing our servers to be overloaded at that time each day.

To protect our servers from being overloaded we’re going to block this application from 3:00 UTC – 4:00 UTC. We’re hoping that this will alllow us to identify the application and start a dialog with the application authors. Once we have established communication with the authors and worked up a plan to fix this, we’re going to release the block.

We really dislike blocking applications, but if applications are being inconsiderate of our resources, we’re left with few options. We hope to hear from the application authors soon so we can resolve this issue. Also, we’re moving forward with our plans to require User-Agent strings that properly identify applications using our service to fix this problem going forward.

If you are the author of said application, please leave a comment with information on how we can get in touch with you.